"What happened? Where did the time window go?"
Rose stared numbly at where the mirror had been, where her Doctor had disappeared. She was too numb, too shocked to do anything or say anything, or even bloody think anything. It was as though she were stuck in that nanosecond after he'd crashed through the mirror: stuck between heartbeats, between breaths, between blinks of her eyes. Except she knew she wasn't—she heard Mickey panicking behind her.
"How's he gonna get back?"
She became aware of the burning of tears behind her eyes, the fire in her lungs demanding she take in more oxygen. If only she could really freeze here in time, the way that clockwork man had frozen with the fire extinguisher, she could pretend that the Doctor would really come back to her. But she wasn't, and he wasn't, either. A tear slipped down her cheek, its cooling track a welcome change from the burning under her skin. "He's not," she said, but not out loud. Her mouth wasn't working. Nothing was working. Nothing would ever work again, not without Him.
"We can't fly the TARDIS without him. How's he gonna get back, Rose?"
Mickey was behind her somewhere, still going on, disrupting the mournful silence that had settled around her. Didn't he get it? Then again, even she didn't get it. How could this have happened? How could he have left her like that, without even thinking? He'd merely gone to find that blasted horse, jumped on it like some sort of cowboy, and then crashed through that glass. Had he even looked her way? She held back any replies to Mickey that sluggishly began to appear in her brain, and instead looked out the window, into the star-filled sky.
It hadn't been enough time. She hadn't spent long enough with this man. Then again, who could blame him for not wanting to spend any longer with her than he had to? He'd had plenty of women—he'd had Cleopatra of the bloody Nile for god's sake. And Sarah Jane. And Madame Pompadour, the beautiful mistress of the King of France. What did he want with little Rose Tyler, shop girl, eater of chips? She was lucky, that was all—lucky that she'd had even this long with him.
Hours passed. Too many hours. Mickey had long since quieted, sat down in some far corner of the room. He was somehow far more accepting of the Doctor's disappearance than Rose was, even despite her resignation to the whole ordeal. Finally she heard him move again, heard him coming toward her. "Rose…" he said softly. She recognized that voice—he'd used it when her cat had died a few years ago. It was overly gentle, as though he were afraid that if he spoke too loudly, she'd crack or something. "Rose, come away from there. Come sit down or something. I found some chips on the TARDIS: why don't you come eat with me."
Chips. She was expected to eat chips? Rose scoffed, but it turned into a sob. She was moving now, unfrozen and collapsing all at the same time. Mickey moved quickly to catch her, but wasn't fast enough: she'd fallen to the ground and, ignoring the dull ache in her thigh from the hard ground, was sitting up and hiding her face in her hands. "He's gone, Mickey," she sobbed. "The Doctor's just up and left me, Mickey, without a warning or even a goodbye, so tell me if you can, just how the hell I'm supposed to go about eating bloody chips!"
Mickey didn't answer. She hadn't expected him to, really. Instead, he knelt next to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She was tempted to shrug it off, but at his touch, so warm and soft and human and…present, something deep inside of her snapped and she turned to bury her face in his shoulder. Rose wasn't crying anymore, but she would do anything to block this out of her mind, to stop looking at the empty wall that had swallowed up her Doctor, never to let him return again.